Martyn Iles, as many readers will know, was managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby until sacked by the Board in February 2023, was appointed Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis in May of that year, and in November was promoted to Executive CEO, working alongside Ken Ham, who remains as Founding CEO.
While still in Australia, Iles promoted right-wing causes in the name of individual religious freedom, expressed support on his YouTube channel for the claim that the 2020 US presidential election had been stolen, and in a Facebook post on January 21 2020, just two weeks after the January 6 insurrection, reaffirmed his admiration for Donald Trump. However, since joining Answers in Genesis he has, to the best of my knowledge, refrained from overtly political comment. In a Facebook post on March 17 this year he explicitly rejected the idea of a “Christian nation,” since being a Christian or not is a characteristic of individuals. Thus he has placed a welcome distance between himself and the extremes of US Christian Nationalism.
“Finally, your story has a practical problem,” Questor says: “Is the panda’s thumb a poor design?” — whereupon a panda peeks its head through the panel and confides, “I rather like it, you know” (page 78). In essence, she is attacking premise (4) of Teller’s argument, by a clever appeal to the literature. Questor is presumably a college biology professor, and Wiester, who provided “the science input” for WDGDWI, is a college biology professor. Where do they go to get the information on the panda’s thumb? The Encyclopedia Americana, which Questor quotes as saying that the panda’s thumb “enables the panda to eat bamboo efficiently” and to “handle stems with great dexterity” (page 78, charmingly illustrated with a panda twirling stalks of bamboo in drum-major fashion). Gould, in contrast, consulted D. Dwight Davis’s monograph The Giant Panda (1964), which he characterized as “the greatest work of modern evolutionary comparative anatomy” (Gould 1980: 22).
Regardless of the far-from-authoritative nature of their source, Newman and Wiester’s emphasis on the efficiency of the panda’s thumb reveals that they have again misrepresented Gould’s argument, apparently due to their conflation of two senses in which it is possible for design (or, if you prefer, “design”) to be suboptimal. In the first sense, a biological feature is suboptimally designed if it accomplishes its function not as efficiently as it (or a plausible substitute) might. Thus in the first sense, to say that the panda’s thumb is suboptimally designed is to say that it is not as useful for stripping leaves from bamboo as it (or a plausible substitute) might be. In the second sense, however, a biological feature is suboptimally designed if it is not designed as well as it might have been, that is, if the process whereby it acquired the ability to accomplish its function was not as efficient as it (or a plausible substitute) might have been. That there is such a sense of what it is for design to be suboptimal is testified to by the computer engineer’s word “kludge,” which refers to a clumsy and inelegant, but not necessarily ineffective, solution to a problem. In the second sense, to say that the panda’s thumb is suboptimally designed is to say that the process whereby it acquired the ability to strip leaves from bamboo was a kludge.
This article is written by two young earth creationists, who take 25 closely argued pages including 93 references to show complete misunderstanding of the relationship between observation and interpretation in evolution science, in order to claim a false epistemic symmetry between this science and the theological perspective which forces them to reject it; a more sophisticated version of the “two pairs of spectacles” thesis that has been with us since George McCready Price. So why am I bothering to review this article? And why, to my own surprise, do I find myself welcoming its appearance?
For three reasons. Firstly, because the authors, unlike “creation science” young earth creationists, accept the validity of the science in its own terms, rather than claiming that it is inferior to their own fantastical offerings. Secondly, because they lay out extremely clearly (and self-revealingly) their own epistemic position. And finally, because their recommendations, made regarding conversations within the evangelical community, are applicable (and indeed to some extent already applied) to the very practical problem of how to teach evolution science in places with a faith-based culture.
